Recently I celebrated the 10^th anniversary of my ordination. Ten years as a priest! A time for some reflection! I can say it out loud: They’ve been good years, full enough of giving and receiving. I have enjoyed the ministry and have been able to help some even as I have been helped by others. There have been too some incredibly special moments, depth moments clearly touched with transcendence, and I have also tasted sufficient agony. I’ve no regrets. My initial fears upon entering the seminary had centered around loneliness and boredom. Those two issues have been non-issues. The specters of pressure, over-intensity and burnout cast a much more threatening shadow. But I’ve survived, and survived with enough enthusiasm to hoist a few beers to celebrate the event and to look forward to the future. As I look ahead, I would like to offer a reflection to the Catholic community vis-à-vis its priests. Put quite simply it is this: Stop pressuring your priests to be less than fully human. Let me explain:

Roman Catholics still understand a priest too much in terms of his cultic role. There is undue significance given to the cultic powers a priest has to preside at Eucharist and other sacraments. Partly because of this the priest is too easily cast in the role of the tribal medicine man, the guy who can do magic and who has a ritual (‘hocus-pocus”) power which we do not understand and somehow fear. Like the medicine man he is respected and revered because he is, ultimately, feared. He is never genuinely loved, nor understood, because he is never perceived and accepted as being fully like us. Too frequently, with all but our very closest friends, we are made to feel out-of-the-ordinary, medicine men! More serious still is the Catholic community’s understanding of the priest as a relational sexual being. Bottom line, a priest is expected to act as if he were not a sexed male being full of erotic impulse and sexual complexity.  Please do not misunderstand me here: What I am pleading for is not that the Catholic community invites or condones erotic weakness and irresponsibility in its priests. Nor should it invite its priest to be “simply one of the boys.” The issue is one of accepting a priest’s full humanity, including his sexuality and the necessary complexity that follows from this. The priest need not be handed a license to be irresponsible, but he desperately needs to be handed the feeling that he is understood and accepted fully as he is, including his complexities and sexuality.

Unfortunately that is rarely afforded to us and, consequently, we must pretend….pretend that we are eunuchs. No eunuch can preach effectively to the full-blooded. That is why we are politely listened to even as it is taken for granted that we have nothing vital to say. In this area, a priest often finds himself in a no-win situation. If he seemingly understands life too clearly, including its earthier aspects of sex, eros and sin, then he draws the wrath and suspicion of the Catholic community (witness Andrew Greeley). Conversely, if he radiates the innocence and naiveté that the community demands, he is relegated to the realm of the insignificant; still allowed to do his hocus-pocus, but no full-blooded person turns to him for a genuine understanding or guidance. It is an interesting speculation as to why the Catholic community wants its priests to radiate naiveté and non-complexity. I suspect that is because, deep down, we are all afraid of our own darker side, our complexity (our shadow, in the Jungian sense). We deny this darker side in us and, somehow, if father goes through life pretending that no shadow exists, we can also more easily pretend it does not exist in us.

Finally, we tend to leave no room for our priests to be weak. I am not speaking here of weak in the moral sense, but weak in the way Jesus was weak and in the way any truly compassionate person is: vulnerable, not always together, emotionally wounded, over-extended and prone to cry very needy tears at times. We demand instead someone who projects that all is well at all times and who bleeds only ichor. If a priest shows emotional weakness, shows his own needs, or gets too involved in the lives and loves of those he is friends with and ministers to, he is suspect. And so my plea is this: Please don’t, consciously or unconsciously, ask your priest to dress in medieval clothes, to stay in the sanctuary, and to be so timorous so as to be unable to dare the perilous task of living. Let him be himself…complex, weak, sexed, masculine, involved, needy, and free not to pretend. Priests are tired of dressing in the clothing (psychological and physical) of senility while everyone is crying to be young; tired of living as eunuchs with no blood, sinew and passion. Small wonder nobody wants to join us!

We need, priests and community together, to risk some new directions. There are dangers involved, but, as Goethe once put it: “The dangers of life are infinite and safety is among them.”

One of the most precious of all experiences is being with a person when he or she is dying. Paradoxically, death clarifies so many things about life and the dying often generate community in ways that the living cannot. Today a group of us were with a young American soldier as he died. That group was a curious mixture of persons: A commanding officer with no church affiliation, an agnostic American doctor, two German doctors (of whose backgrounds I know nothing), a young American couple and myself, a Catholic priest. We were all there, for different reasons, to watch Sgt. Mark die.

Mark had been fatally injured in an accident two days previous and his life was being sustained by life support machines. The German doctors had now decided to unhook those machines since there was no longer any brain function and, according to German law, a person is then legally dead and a hospital need no longer use extraordinary means to sustain that life. His parents had been telephoned and had reluctantly consented to have the machines removed. They requested three things: that a Catholic priest be present, that an American doctor verify that Mark’s condition was truly hopeless and that Mark’s closest friend, a fellow GI in Germany, be present. The commanding officer gathered us and we met in his car on route to the hospital. It was awkward and strained. We were meeting each other for the first time, the situation itself was sufficiently tense, and we were very different kinds of persons.

The commanding officer was used to commanding and his attitudes and clothing showed it. The doctor was all business, talking of tests and legalities. Mark’s friends, Danny and his wife Patty, were in sharp contrast to the officer and the doctor. They were simple folk, casually dressed, religious and pious, down-to earth and very scared, praying and crying. However, they would soon enough show a courage which would help us all. I was the unknown priest, summoned for the occasion, not used to commanding officers or watching life support systems being turned off; also scared and praying. We arrived at the hospital where Mark lay; a boy of 22, in a foreign country, without his family, soon to die. The American doctor grimly checked the tests and retained that grimness as he nodded to the German doctors and to us. The German doctors approached me: “Jetzt – Should we do it now?”

I looked at Danny and Patty and we asked for some time to pray. The three doctors and the officer stood back. I clutched the book of rites and led prayers for the dying. Danny clutched Patty with one hand and Mark’s near lifeless hand with his other and we prayed like we’ve seldom prayed before: the prayers for the dying, the Lord’s Prayer, some Hail Marys. When we’d finished, Danny, a tall man (six feet five inches – most of it honest heart) put his head on Mark’s chest. He began to cry. I nodded to the German doctors; all business in their medical uniforms. Four or five turns of a valve and the machines stopped. It was as simple as turning off a heating radiator. When it was over, Danny’s tears stopped. Releasing Mark’s hand, he stood tall and pounded Mark’s chest: “Sgt. Mark, congratulations! You are the first of all of us to make it home! Goodbye!” He spoke the words loudly, with strength. Afterwards we walked from the room. Outside, through a glass paneling, we saw the German doctors slowly removing the machines and tubes. Danny, Patty and myself stopped for a last few Hail Marys.  Then we hugged each other, dried tears and walked to the waiting room where we sat to compose ourselves and to wait for the officer and the American doctor to finish signing forms.  There was a different atmosphere on route homewards. The commanding officer was less commanding, his tie was loosened considerably and so was his heart. The doctor now talked no more of tests and legalities, for we all talked of meaning and purpose in life. Danny and Patty no longer looked out of place in their denims and blue jeans. They clutched each other’s hands and the rest of us regretted only that for the sake of pride and proper appearance we were prevented from joining hands as well.

I was no longer awkward nor scared, and it felt oh so good to be a priest! There we sat, strangers, though not quite anymore, all so different, but now bound warmly because of what we had shared. Yes we sat now, seeing life and each other with a clarity and charity so seldom given. We had prayed for Mark and those prayers, I am sure, had helped him. But they had also helped us. It was a rare grace.

Congratulation, Sgt. Mark!

Zorba and Religion 070483

I am not sure how often I have read Nikos Kazantzakis’, Zorba the Greek. It is a haunting book with a strange power to ignite and excite in a mixed way. Most of us know the story. An intense, reflective, morally uptight and very cautious young writer meets Zorba. In him the young writer sees the key to celebration, freedom and joyful living. Zorba is a man who is totally spontaneous. He lives freely, loves freely, and sings and dances spontaneously.

No given to ponderousness and reflectiveness, he is also not given to heaviness of spirit or body. He takes life as a child, trustingly, without remorse and declares that the only truly unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit is not to abandon in love (in some less acceptable version of that phrase!). The book haunts me because, measured against Zorba, most of us appear as emotional and psychological cripples, uptight, non-celebrating, very inhibited persons. Moreover recent studies have shown there is a direct co-relation between how autonomous a person is in life and how religious he or she is. The more people are autonomous, the less they are religious, and the more religious they are, the more they are unfree and inhibited. It would seem that religion and freedom are incompatible.

Where does that leave us? Abandon the Gospels for Zorba? Can Zorba challenge us to bring a higher synthesis out of Jesus’ message to celebrate, to abandon more, to be less inhibited and simply to take life and love less reflectively? Does Christian morality, if taken seriously, rob life of its richness and freedom? These questions haunt any reflective Christian. However there comes a point when the haunting must stop and some hard exorcism must take place because the philosophy of Zorba contains a fallacy, that of identifying pre-morality with genuine liberation. It confuses the mind of the child for the mind of the truly free person. That is a very subtle demon. Had it substituted anything else for true freedom its error would have been easier to detect. As it is, the book tortures a genuinely moral mind. Why?

Because it would have us believe that it is easy to celebrate and love and take life. It would have us believe that society’s rules, personal inhibitions and agreed upon standards are not important. In short, it would have us believe that we can live free as the birds, soaring, unencumbered by demands and expectations of others. Unfortunately, anyone who is even remotely moral experiences that this is not so easy, and is quite impossible in fact because as we try to share our lives in love and celebration without exploiting and raping each other, we run into an emotional, psychological, moral, sexual, and spiritual complexity that makes the studies of a brain surgeon look like elementary arithmetic. Only two types of persons do not know or respect this: the amoral-immoral (who ignore or flaunt the moral structure) and the pre-moral, the children, who are insufficiently developed to recognize morality.

When a child’s spontaneity and unchecked zest for life pushes her into uninhibited enjoyment, irrespective of the consequences, there are no elements of rape of others (because she is just a child) and we see the selfishness as being cute. What Kazantzakis proposes to us in Zorba the Greek is precisely that – the pre-moral actions of a child: cute, uninhibited, free, happy, but totally irresponsible in an adult. What masquerades as autonomy and celebration is the premoral spontaneity of a child. There is an immense difference between the spontaneous naive freedom of a child, acting happily, unaware of the consequences of its actions, and the true freedom of a moral adult. The latter must be sensitive to a moral and aesthetic structure which, because it respects everyone, induces constant hesitations, agonies, inhibitions, and frustrations in all those trying to love and celebrate. The kingdom of God can only come about when all of us can sit down at the same table and share food and wine, love, hearts, bodies, sexuality and spirit with each other. That coming together is not easy, as the cumulative frustration of mankind (not to mention our own personal frustrations) more than adequately attests to. It requires some elements of Zorba: spontaneity, abandonment, and a child-likeness which permits a simple enjoyment and is not paralyzed by an unhealthy frigidity and neurotic over-reflection. However it also requires a very “unchildish” discipline, respect for all others, chastity, patience and waiting.

A powerful and haunting piece of sculpture by Michelangelo is entitled: The Awakening Slave. It shows a body struggling to emerge from stone, to pull itself free. Part of the body is already clearly formed, the rest is still inchoate, hidden and imprisoned in stone. Few images capture as much the feeling of what it means to be human! Born as infants, we are helpless, with little self-consciousness, dependent, unable to speak, unable to really know ourselves and others, bound by countless limitations. In the moment of birth we partly emerge from the stone. The rest of our life is a struggle to be born further, to pull ourselves further free. But, very early, we sense that it is hard. We are so limited, in our intelligence, in our energy, in our psyches, in our emotions, in our moral abilities, in our relationships, and in our physical make-up. We push too hard and something breaks! There is only one place where we do not sense our limits, only one place where we can fly, free of stone…in our dreams.

In the kind of dreams that we dream in our ideals (not the kind we dream at night) we can truly dance, fly, love perfectly, be totally beyond our own and others’ limits. There are no limitations of energy, love, relationships or emotion in our dreams. There we can pull ourselves completely free from the stone and, then, turn around and look at our actual imprisonment. Unfortunately too many of us no longer dream. Dreaming is out of fashion. Realism, cynicism and despair are in vogue. To dream today is to be laughed at, ridiculed, to be regarded as naïve, childish and, ultimately, as pitiable. We see this, for example, in the common reaction to anything that is idealistic, romantic, virginal or contains the type of things we used to write poetry about. Nobody seems to be challenged be these things anymore to dream dreams, to push themselves into deeper and more special realms. Mostly these things are met with cynicism and disbelief, coupled with the urge to debunk and with the pitying condescension that we save for the especially naive. Kid’s stuff!

I am saddened by this critique. I have seen hopelessness, the lack of dreams, in 80-year-olds, in bad health, shunted off, unwanted, to die in auxiliary homes because nobody wants them any longer. It is justifiably hard for them to dream! But when I see, basically, the same hopelessness in gifted, beautiful, richly endowed young people with every practical reason in the world to be dreaming great dreams, I can only be saddened. Despair…and so young. Why? We’ve stopped dreaming. We have gotten sucked in by an un-virginal cynicism of an age that confuses despair with realism. We have stopped struggling and, bottom line; we have despaired that we can ever have a profound relationship, a real romance, genuine community, aesthetic love or full sexuality. Velief in them is like belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. That’s for kids! We have settled for what we can have, second best, and are cynical about any more idealistic realities. Those of us who are married are no longer trying to attain the optimum with our partner. We have settled for some less-demanding second best, or are looking elsewhere. Those of us who are celibate are no longer trying, with all the incredible tension this involves, to love genuinely, yet celibately. Our cynicism has declared that the ideal is impossible and so we become either a sterile old bachelor or maid, or we live a double standard.

All cynicism is despair, pure and simple. All refusal to dream dreams of something beyond is a giving up, a resignation to mediocrity, a self-imposed condemnation to remain partly unborn, in prison. Despair is simply the defeat of our dreams of greatness. Few things mire us as deeply in the stone as does our refusal to believe in the ideal. “There is only one real sin,” Doris Lessing once remarked, “and that is calling second best by anything other than what it really is, second best!” Moreover it is important that we do not just dream alone. Dreams need to be shared. What we dream alone remains a dream, what we dream with others becomes a reality! Pain and imprisonment result because people have no one to dream with. No person can cut themselves free of the stone by themselves. We achieve nothing truly in isolation. We need to dream and to share those dreams: Build dream castles in our minds, ideal loves and communities in our hearts. We cannot get fully out of the stone in fact, but we can in desire, in our dreams. They are the chisel which we can use to slowly cut away the stone and enable ourselves to emerge to further birth. Everything can be overcome if we dream. Through dreams we see the end of our exile.

Does all this sound like the ravings of an unrealistic dreamer? The naive daydreams and the wishful thinking of a young man out of touch with reality? The rantings of someone with delusions of grandeur? Perhaps! They are the dreams of a young man, a very idealistic one in fact. And, yes, he has delusions of grandeur! But they aren’t my dreams. You can read about them in the 17^th chapter of John’s Gospel.

In 1948 a young and very idealistic Trappist monk wrote the story of his own conversion. The story was classic: a young man, bursting with life and dreams, searches, desperately and intensely. He runs the gamut – booze, sex, jazz, art, writing, higher learning, travel, anything that can potentially offer respite to a painfully restless heart! He comes home empty, the thirst worse. He turns to God. The prodigal son comes home. In this case, to become a Trappist monk at the Cisterian Abbey at Gethsemani, Kentucky. Most of us read The Seven Storey Mountain. We met Thomas Merton there. But that was 1948. Merton changed, much else changed, in the 20 years until his death in 1968.

Most of us stopped reading Merton, except perhaps for a few of his more directly devotional treatises. We wondered what was happening to him. What we heard, mostly second-hand, left us uneasy. We heard he was struggling with his community, at odds with his abbot, was leaving or had left the Trappists, had neurotic problems, and was more interested in Eastern mysticism than in Christianity. The Trappists’ prize child, it seemed, had become their enfant terrible. Monica Furlong, in a recent biography of Merton (Merton: A Biography, Harper and Row, 1980), gives us a good look at the complex phenomenon which was Thomas Merton. It is a book I heartily recommend. It contains something for everyone. I say this despite the fact that the book has been severely criticized (and justly, so, I submit). For instance, John Eudes Bamberger, abbot of Genessee Abbey, Piffard, N.Y., who lived with Merton for nearly 20 years, contends that Furlong stylizes the facts to make them fit her own thesis, namely, that the Trappists stifled Merton and that he would have blossomed far more, both as writer and artist, outside of their monastic community. In the end, Furlong is out of sympathy with the monastic endeavor. She slants some of the facts accordingly.

Be that as it may, the book is a great one nonetheless. Furlong gives us a deep insight into Merton’s unconverted, prodigal years. She chronicles his struggles – his early rootlessness, the effect of his mother’s death, and his unsatisfying pilgrimage through sex, alcohol, and art – in a way which is far more honest (and thus ultimately more inspirational for us) than is Merton’s own autobiography which only hints in a generic way at his dark past. As such the book offers much to any heart whose restlessness has taken it down roads far from the Father’s house. Furlong’s description of Merton’s early struggles is good, honest, and interesting. It is, indeed, a description of Merton’s dark night of the senses. More interesting, however, is her outline of Merton’s post-Seven Storey Mountain struggles. The real mountain, for him, remained still to be climbed! The prodigal son who had found his way home had now to contend with the far less glamorous and more difficult task of remaining there – and finding there ways to express his energy and love. In the second half of the book, Furlong gives us an insight into the real grist from which Merton’s ultimate sanctity springs, his dark night of the spirit.

His struggle, as is evident, is not ultimately with his abbot, nor with his community, but is the struggle of the rich young man trying to enter the kingdom through the eye of a needle. And it is a love story, a true love story. Like all true love stories: In the beginning there is passion, in the middle there is much pain and doubt, in the end there is peace. Merton was a man gifted and rich in mind and heart. Talented and restless. After some prodigal years he turns up at his Father’s house – but he meets there not the glorified Christ of the resurrection but the Christ who is incarnated in flawed human flesh, in a concrete community. The love story follows, unglamorous but real: commitment, superiors, tasteless tasks, deadlines, community pettiness, narrowness, all interwoven with freedom, giving, dreams, and greatness. His heart pulls him on one way, his talent pulls him in another, his community pulls him in ways he would rather not go, and his God pulls him always. There is some giving and some taking, some good times and bad, some ulcers, some suspected neurosis, much frustration, occasional bitterness. He suffers, his community suffers; both grow. In the end there is peace, deep peace…with God, with his community, with the world community, and within himself. He made it! He sorted through the riddle. He found his way home from exile.

We can be helped by reading his story.

Conversion begins with the act of falling in love. All miracles do.  Only love does miracles, only it has the power to genuinely subvert the deepest ruts in our lives, to dehabituate us, moving us beyond the prison of our own selfishness. There is a lot of confusion about conversion. Mostly we associate it with the begrudging regret that fear forces upon us rather than with the genuine remorse that follows falling in love.

Let me illustrate with an example: The classical picture of a conversion story is usually that of the “death-bed” conversion: A man lives a long selfish life…wine, women and song! No church, no morality! And he enjoys it! Only the occasional prick of conscience disturbs him.

But this can only last for awhile. Alas, one day he is stricken ill. Suddenly his life flashes before his eyes, as does eternity, filling him with a deep fear and a deep regret.  He realizes that this is the eleventh hour. He senses he is dying and does not want to face his creator. Choking on fear, he repents, converts. The priest is hastily summoned, a confession is heard. He dies peacefully; luckily inside God’s grace. We breathe a sigh of relief even as we secretly envy him for having had a fling and yet getting heaven besides. This is a story that, in fact, quite often happens; unfortunately so. It is not, I submit, a genuine conversion. It is a conversion of sorts (imperfect contrition, the old catechism aptly called it). Minimally it is enough. It spares the man hellfire. What it does not spare him, however, is the need to fall in love and, in the light of that love, to come to a whole new way of living and loving. This man has still to reach the “eleventh hour”!

Let us imagine another conversion story, a genuine one: A person is living a very immoral life. A selfish defiance allows her to live for self, seeking hedonistic pleasure, regardless of what her actions mean to others and how they might hurt them. Her life is guided only by selfish pursuits. One day she falls in love…with another person, with a community, with God, with an ideal, or with all of them. Suddenly she is filled with a deep remorse. She realizes it is the eleventh hour! She repents, converts, usually in tears. However, her regret and tears are not because she is afraid of death or afraid of facing her creator. Her regret and tears stem from her knowledge of what her sin has done to her and to her new love. It has had her waste years, waste her love, damage her dignity, living away from her loved one, outside of the goodness and love which make up her love’s body, the body of Christ. She realizes, perhaps only unconsciously, that she has missed something. Whatsoever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven! She realizes that she has not been bound in heaven because she has not been bound, nor held, on earth.

There is in this story a genuine moment of conversion because there is a genuine falling in love. There is real repentance. In the light of the new love there is an entirely new understanding of life. There is, as well, a new enthusiasm for life. In Nietzsche’s famous phrase, there is a “transvaluation of values.” Everything is understood in a new way. This is the eleventh hour! In John of the Cross’ phrase, she is now “fired with love’s urgent longings.” She is dehabituated, born-again, empowered to live anew…and it is a miracle, a pure gift that only God’s spirit can produce. However, unlike the other conversion story, nothing is based on fear. There is, sure enough, a deep regret. But it is no longer the regret of the scared and defeated, the bitter regret of the man whose will is broken by force or death. It is the regret of the person who realizes that he has missed something precious. However, this falling in love is not a painless, perennially-painted-with-romance experience. There is more to rebirth than falling at the feet of a Billy Graham, falling in love with an attractive member of the opposite sex, or crying away guilt in a moment of charismatic fervor.

Rebirth means entering again the fetal darkness of the womb, allowing oneself to be gestated by love, and allowing love’s goodness to make a deep incision into one’s sickest parts. This is always a painful, excruciating experience. For this reason, many times, conversions do not last. The old world rises up and recaptures the new, the new wine breaks the old wineskins. The conversion is lost. When this happens then we have been to the eleventh hour, but have not repented. We return to exile, away from love’s body.  As Soren Kierkegaard puts it: “When remorse awakens concern, whether it be in the youth or the old man, it awakens it always at the eleventh hour. It is not deceived by a false notion of a long life, for it is the eleventh hour. “And in the eleventh hour one understands life in a wholly different manner than in the days of youth or in the busy time of manhood or the final moments of old age. He who repents at any other hour of the day repents in the temporal sense.”

Falling in love is the eleventh hour. The miracle leading to repentance is only a tear away!

Have you ever had the experience of being touched very deeply by something that left you, in its wake, strangely inarticulate?

The experience is profound – it moves you, frightens you, teaches you, changes you and you know it is doing you good – but you are left stunned, wondering how to respond.

I feel that way now, sitting in this, the hugest, dirtiest, most congested and poorest city I have ever been in:  Cairo, Egypt.

I remember my naïve enthusiasm in coming here.  The quick, smug, letters to friends:  “I want to go and rub shoulders with the poor, see the Third World, taste its dirt, its overcrowdedness, its inhumanness.

“I want to see poverty, first-hand, let it jar me into making a deeper response.  A response to what?  I don’t know.  I just know that I need to see that kind of poverty for myself!”

I am seeing it now and the experience is more than I want it to be:  12 million persons, all living in an area capable of giving even minimally adequate space, water, sanitation and human living conditions to only one-quarter of that number!

It is a megalopolis of dirt, noise, lack of privacy, overcrowdedness, smell and poverty.  For a Westerner, like myself, it is overpowering.

Superficially, it is overpowering because I am unable to find for myself the sanitary food, the clean air and water, the space, and the privacy and quietness I am used to.

More seriously, it is overpowering because, while it is ripping open inside of me very serious questions about the validity of my own lifestyle and my normal concerns (and Western affluence in general), it is leaving me powerless to respond in any truly useful way.

Perhaps what I am feeling is what is so generally felt in the face of the disturbing fact of social injustice and poverty.  It is real.  We know that we should be doing more, sharing more.  But what?

Everything seems so huge, so hopeless, so beyond us!  We are locked into a huge system, more powerful than ourselves.  So are the poor.  Our efforts to help seem puny and impotent.

Moveover, we have our own limitations and problems, deep, painful poverties of our own which seemingly already demand more energy than we have.  There is in our lives, already, more than enough malnourishment and dirt with which to contend.

It is an overpowering helplessness that I feel here.  I look at the magnitude of the problems and I am depressed.  I look at my own abilities (and inabilities) to respond… and I am further depressed.

What can I do?  I can come and look.  I can, as I have already done, stay in a poorer section of Cairo.  I can walk through Cairo’s worst slum, the “Red Alley,” Darb el Ahmar, (where few tourists venture).

I can ride the city buses, look at faces, talk to some people.  I can spend some time talking and working with Sister Emmanuelle, among Cairo’s very poorest, sitting on a dirt floor teaching Arab kids (crawling with fleas) kindergarten.

I can help hold a young girl of five as the doctor disinfects her wounded foot and be moved with pity and compassion.  But… in the end, I am playing a game and I know it.  Even my looking has a safe antiseptic distance to it.  Yet, I am not sure what, barring prayer, I can do.

I do not have the charism of a Mother Teresa, a Sister Emmanuelle (see Time, Dec. 27, 1982), nor a Sister Kathleen (who works with Sister Emmanuelle in Cairo).  I can’t drink the water, eat the food, speak the language, nor, in fact, even offer proper empathy and support to those who have the charisms for the front lines.

In the end, I am helplessly distanced.

What can I do? I am a priest and teacher.  Turn my theology classroom into a social justice seminar?  Preach on social justice more often?  Perhaps.  But is that an answer?

And what of the very real problems within our own society?  Are our pains less real?  Less urgent?  Does social injustice in the Third World bring about more pain and death than psychological, emotional, and spiritual injustice in the First World?  What types of dirt and malnourishment dehumanize more?

I have seen the worst slums of Cairo, but I have also seen the seamiest sides of San Francisco, New York, London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt.  Which is worse and which would I choose to live in?  I am not sure!

Right now I am only sure of being deeply unsure.  Veni, vidi, non-vici!  The riddles grows thicker, the glass darkens, the exile is further from home!

I am here with two friends.  Occasionally, when the noise, dirt, and lack of space seem a bit overpowering, one of us asks the others:  “What are we doing here?”

I suspect the answer will be slow in coming.  The transfiguration of Christ always stuns those who witness it.  However, like the earliest followers of Christ sensed when their normal perception of Christ was transformed, “It is good that we are here!”

Jesus had an interesting notion of time. In Scripture, we see him chiding the scribes and Pharisees (and his disciples) for being so insensitive to “the signs of the times.” They, Christ’s contemporaries, while not being short on the smarts regarding the outer “signs of the times,” were boorishly insensitive to the inner weather, the storms and calms inside the human heart.  They, like us, knew and understood chronology: They knew what it meant when a child was born, when a new day dawned, when the sun set, when storm clouds menaced and when a human body began to lose its vigor and health. But they were virtually blind to the inner weather of the heart: They did not know, nor understand, what it meant when new hope was born, when new possibility dawned, when hope died, when a cataclysm menaced and when a human heart began to lose its health. They measured time by chronology.

For Christ, this was too narrow. In his view, time was not simply chronology, the unfolding of moment after moment. Rather, real time was measured by the unfolding of the movements of the human heart. This is chronology of a different kind. The Kairos, he called it. Unlike chronology, which tells time by pegging itself to the rhythms of nature and outer change, “kairology” tells time by marking the moments of change within the human heart.

Time is a curious phenomenon that we have never really understood. I remember as a young student in philosophy involving myself in long discussions on the metaphysics of time. We argued endlessly, and fruitlessly, whether there was a metaphysics of the present: “What moment is the real? The past? The future? Is the present real or is it in the past by the time we experience it? But the past isn’t present so it can’t be real! And the future is not yet here, so how can it be real?” Critical questions to preoccupy idealistic students in classrooms and beer halls! In truth, we live neither fully in the present, past or future. We live in a certain communion of past, present, future. We experience in the present, but virtually all we experience is haunted by both our past and our future. Very seldom do we simply live in the present. Rather elements from our past – half-remembered lullabies from our childhood, a forgotten face, a past hurt, a past love, a past guilt, a past terror – impale themselves upon our present, coloring it in ways far beyond what the moment itself is offering. As well, a future hope, an approaching decision, an impending visit from a friend, or a fear of sickness or death can impale themselves upon our present causing feelings far different from what the present is dictating.

The present never comes to us pure. It takes color from both our past and our future. It has its own time! Kairology. But this curious and unpredictable mixture of time in us, this interplay of past-present-future which provokes within us an inability to live in the present moment, is precisely what makes the human spirit human. It makes our hearts different from the hearts of animals because it breaks our hearts – it breaks their simple link to the present and to chronology and gives them a time all their own. Daily, hourly, each minute of our lives, our past and future impale themselves upon our present and cause a break. And in that break, that crack, the future and God’s spirit (Love) can flow into our lives in a totally new way: the exhilarating illumination which can lead to a new vision; the sudden regret which can lead to new repentance and forgiveness: the inexplicable melancholy that can lead to renewed risk in love. Unfortunately, not only grace and God’s spirit are capable of flowing through the crack. New forms of melancholy, guilt, and despair can flow through equally as easily.

However, for a Christian, if our life is grounded in faith, hope and charity, the crack serves mainly to let in new and positive possibilities: new resurrection, unexpected novelty, unhoped-for hope and seemingly impossible possibility. In fact, it is precisely because of this dynamic interplay of past-present-future that the Christian cannot, ultimately, despair. The very fact that our heart’s rhythms are not tied to chronology is a fact that forces us to move beyond the resigned: “nothing-new-under-the-sun” attitude. Always there are new possibilities, spawning new hope, urging renewed trust, pushing towards new repentance, demanding fresh risk. Always there is an opening in our hearts for the influx of grace and God’s spirit in a new way. This is also true regarding our lives of friendship, intimacy, love and sexuality. Every deep human friendship comes laden with a complexity that is almost too much for a human to cope with. Interplays of past-present-future create an “inner weather” that is now infinitely more complex because there are now two hearts involved. However, again, the very complexity of it all is the final cause for hope. The complex interplay of two hearts causes huge new cracks…hearts break, and, through the cracks, grace, the Holy Spirit, and love can pour in in ways which, prior to that relationship, were unimaginable. Thank God for complexity!

Our task is to be sensitive to the “inner weather” of our hearts, to watch for the moments of grace… and to keep within ourselves enough faith, hope and charity, so that, when our hearts break, previously unimagined grace can pour in.